Korean researchers have discovered the possibility of treating Alzheimer’s disease.
Professor Kyung-tae Kim of the Department of Life Sciences at Pohang University of Science and Technology (Postech) and Eun-ji Oh, a doctoral student, announced on the 10th that they had developed a substance that activates the ‘peroxisomal proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)’ through joint research with Nometa Pharma, a domestic new drug development company. .
In Alzheimer’s disease patients, cognitive function and memory gradually decrease as abnormal protein aggregates are made in brain tissue and nerve cells are damaged by chronic inflammatory response.
The research team focused on PPARs, which have been studied as therapeutic targets for obesity, dyslipidemia, and diabetes.
PPAR is a type of nuclear receptor and is a transcription factor that regulates gene expression by binding to gene transcriptional regulatory regions.
A transcription factor is a transcriptional regulatory protein that activates or represses the transcription of a specific gene by binding to the regulatory region DNA of a specific gene (the process in which the genetic information of DNA is transferred to messenger RNA).
The research team has developed a compound that can bind to the PPAR protein as a drug development platform.
When this compound was administered to an experimental mouse model of Alzheimer’s dementia for 3 months, it was found that memory and cognitive functions, which had fallen due to dementia, were restored as much as in the normal experimental mouse model.
The results of this study were recently published in the international academic journal Neurotherapeutics.
Professor Kim Kyung-tae said, “We will develop a drug optimized for the treatment of Alzheimer’s dementia through toxicity testing and structure-activity relationship analysis.”
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